'Please Do What Is Right': Native American Lawmakers Urge Biden To Free Leonard Peltier

The ailing Indigenous rights activist, who is 77, "deserves to live his final years among his people," say dozens of Native state legislators.


Jennifer Bendery
02/01/2022 
Leaders of the National Caucus of Native American State Legislators wrote to President Joe Biden on Monday urging him to release Leonard Peltier from prison, warning that the 77-year-old Indigenous rights activist is in poor health and deserves ”to live his final years among his people in dignity.”

“Mr. President, please do what is right,” reads the message from New Mexico state Sen. Benny Shendo (D) and North Dakota state Rep. Ruth Buffalo (D), the chair and vice-chair of the caucus, respectively. The caucus represents 89 Native American state legislators from 21 states.

“Amid our country’s racial reckoning after George Floyd’s murder, Native Americans have not yet been included in any promise of federal justice reform. Your clemency towards Mr. Peltier would change that,” Shendo and Buffalo wrote. “His expected release would sound as a promise to the first peoples of these lands that we too enjoy America’s promise of justice for all.”

“Our communities have suffered enough,” they added. “Please prioritize equity.”

Peltier has been in prison for 45 years without any evidence that he committed a crime. The FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office charged him with the 1975 murders of two FBI agents during a shootout on a Native American reservation ― something Peltier has long said he didn’t do, even when taking responsibility for the killings could have meant parole for him. His trial was riddled with misconduct, and even the U.S. attorney who helped put Peltier in prison decades ago is now pleading with Biden to grant him clemency because, he says, federal officials never had evidence that he committed a crime.

On Friday, Peltier tested positive for COVID-19. He is currently in quarantine.

His COVID status has only intensified the calls from supporters and elected officials to let him go home. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, last week urged Biden to commute Peltier’s sentence given his age, illness and time served. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the former longtime chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the longest-serving member of the Senate, has also called on Biden to send Peltier home.

Actor Danny DeVito on Monday joined the calls for Peltier’s release.

“President Joe Biden. Please let Leonard Pleltier [sic] go. You can do it man. Pick up that pen,” he tweeted.

President Joe Biden. Please let Leonard Pleltier go. You can do it man. Pick up that pen.— Danny DeVito (@DannyDeVito) January 31, 2022

Peltier told HuffPost last week that his prison facility’s prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns, and its failure to provide booster shots to inmates, have left him ― and likely others ― unbearably isolated and preparing for death. He is particularly vulnerable to COVID’s effects given his existing serious health problems, including diabetes and an abdominal aortic aneurysm.

“I’m in hell,” he said, days before his COVID diagnosis. “Left alone and without attention is like a torture chamber for the sick and old.”

Buffalo said Tuesday that members of her caucus “understand fully the sense of urgency” in protecting elderly loved ones from COVID, particularly if they are in prison. Native Americans are more than twice as likely to die from COVID as white Americans, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and are incarcerated at a much higher rate than the national average.

“Add inhumane living conditions, and prison guards who don’t follow CDC guidelines, [and] it is a recipe for disaster,” Buffalo told HuffPost. “Even if Mr. Peltier had not been convicted under contested circumstances, his advanced age, ill health and the amount of time he’s served ought to be enough to reconsider his circumstances. We are beyond the stage of making an example, and sheer human compassion and clemency urgently needs to be considered.”

Here’s a copy of the letter to Biden from the National Caucus of Native American State Legislators:           61f99a49e4b0b69cfe86ed26.pdf (google.com)

A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

RELATED...

Leonard Peltier Is America's Longest-Serving Political Prisoner. Biden Is Likely His Last Hope.

Leonard Peltier Tests Positive For COVID-19

Sen. Brian Schatz Urges Biden To Commute Leonard Peltier’s Prison Sentence

BREAKING NEWS: Leonard Peltier Tests Positive for Covid-19



Free Leonard Peltier sign at Standing Rock camp in Dec. 2016.

 (Photo/Levi Rickert)

BY LEVI RICKERT JANUARY 29, 2022

American Indian activist Leonard Peltier (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians), has tested positive for COVID-19 at the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Florida. Peltier is 77-years-old.

“Today, Leonard tested positive for COVID,” Peltier’s attorney Kevin Sharp told HuffPost late Friday. “We are all very concerned, as is Leonard. He wanted people to know that he sends his love and appreciation for the years everyone has fought for him."

According to the HuffPost article, Peltier has not received his vaccination booster shot.

Peltier’s health has long been a concern for those seeking his release from prison for his conviction of killing two FBI agents at Oglala on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. He suffers from heart problems and diabetes.

Supporters believe that Peltier was wrongfully convicted in 1977 for a crime he did not commit. Imprisoned for more than 46 years, Peltier has the support of Amnesty International, and other human rights organizations. Over the years, some 50 members of Congress and others — including Judge Gerald Heaney (8th Circuit Court of Appeals) who sat as a member of the court in two of Peltier’s appeals — have called for his immediate release.

Peltier's COVID-19 diagnosis comes just two days after the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i), sent a letter to President Joe Biden that urged the president to commute the Peltier's sentence.

Leonard Peltier (Photo/Courtesy

Schatz cites Peltier’s advanced age, illness, and a loophole in current laws that unfairly disqualifies Peltier from compassionate release. While legislation led by Schatz to fix the loophole continues to be considered in Congress, that process can take years – time Peltier may not have.

“I commend your administration’s commitment to righting past wrongs in our criminal justice system. In continuing that work as you consider recommendations for individuals to receive clemency, I write to urge you to grant a commutation of Leonard Peltier’s sentence. Mr. Peltier meets appropriate criteria for commutation: (1) his old age and critical illness, (2) the amount of time he has already served, and (3) the unavailability of other remedies. Given these factors, Mr. Peltier should be granted a commutation of his sentence,” Chairman Schatz wrote in his letter to President Biden. “Mr. Peltier has consistently maintained his innocence because the facts of his case, as well as the actions of federal agents and prosecutors involved, raise serious questions about whether he received a fair trial.”

During the daily White House press briefing on Thursday a reporter asked Press Secretary Jen Psaki about Sen. Schatz's letter in the following exchange:

"REPORTER: Yesterday, Senator Schatz, who chairs the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, wrote to the President, asking him to commute the sentence of Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist who was convicted of murder in a very controversial trial about four decades ago. Is that something the President is considering or taking a look at, at this time?

MS. PSAKI: I don’t have anything to predict for you on that front."

Editor's Note: This is a developing story that will be updated as more news becomes available.

President Biden: Enough is Enough, Free Leonard Peltier

BY LEVI RICKERT 

 

JANUARY 30, 2022

The long and sad imprisonment of Leonard Peltier (Turtle Mountain Chippewa Nation) took on a new complication on Friday when it was reported he tested positive for COVID-19 while incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary at Coleman, Fla. (USP Coleman 1).

Prison is not a great place to have COVID-19, especially if you are a 77-year-old man with comorbidities that include diabetes, hypertension, a heart condition and acute aneurysm, such as Peltier.

The Prison Policy Initiative reported in October 2021 that the COVID-19 death rate in prisons is more than double that of the general U.S. population, as calculated by the UCLA COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project

Peltier has been incarcerated for 46 years for the killing of two FBI agents at Oglala on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1975.

To many American Indians, Peltier is a symbol of an oppressive federal system that relegates Native people to apartheid and neglect. He is a political prisoner that we may only think about if we happen to see a bumper sticker on the back of a vehicle that reads “FREE Leonard Peltier.”

The International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee (ILPDC) on Saturday afternoon distributed a news release saying the federal prisons acted recklessly in regard to Peltier’s care. Peltier has yet to receive a COVID-19 booster shot, 11 months after his last vaccination.

The ILPDC noted in its news release that visitors to USP Coleman 1 have observed that the facility is not mandating vaccines for guards or staff. Guards and staff have been seen improperly wearing masks or not wearing them at all. Social distancing was not encouraged or enforced and booster shots had not, until recently, been available to any inmate at USP Coleman 1.

Soon after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, then U.S. Attorney General William Barr issued U.S. Department of Justice guidelines for COVID Release to Home Confinement for inmates who were elderly or with compromised immune system or co-morbidities on March 26 and again, April 3, 2020.

Peltier’s age and comorbidities unequivocally make him eligible for home release under Department of Justice guidelines. Peltier’s tribal community on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota has repeatedly expressed willingness to ensure he is provided adequate housing there.

Senate Committee on Indian Affairs Chairman Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i), sent a letter to President Joe Biden last Wednesday urging him to commute Peltier's sentence. 

“I commend your administration’s commitment to righting past wrongs in our criminal justice system. In continuing that work as you consider recommendations for individuals to receive clemency, I write to urge you to grant a commutation of Leonard Peltier’s sentence. Mr. Peltier meets appropriate criteria for commutation: (1) his old age and critical illness, (2) the amount of time he has served, and (3) the unavailability of other remedies. Given these factors, Mr. Peltier should be granted a commutation of his sentence,” Chairman Schatz wrote.

Leonard Peltier (Photo/Courtesy)

Beyond Peltier’s current battle with COVID-19, the White House needs to review Peltier’s 1977 case, in which two of his co-defendants were acquitted on the basis of self-defense against the FBI.

Peltier was tried separately from his co-defendants.

According to Kevin Sharp, former Chief Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, who Peltier’s current attorney, Peltier’s trial was replete with prosecutorial misconduct, falsified testimony and fabricated evidence. Even the autopsy presented to the jury was done by an examiner who had never seen the bodies of the two agents.

The former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa, James H. Reynolds, who supervised the post-trial sentencing and appeals, admitted they “shaved a few corners” and “we could not prove Leonard Peltier personally committed any crime on the Pine Ridge Reservation” said in a letter to President Biden last year.

Reynolds wrote “enough is enough.”

On behalf of all Indigenous people in the U.S. and across the globe, enough is enough. We call on President Biden to commute the sentence of Leonard Peltier.

Biden Should Free Peltier Right Now

On behalf of all Indigenous people in the U.S. and across the globe, enough is enough. We call on President Biden to commute the sentence of Leonard Peltier.

Chauncey Peltier, son of political prisoner Leonard Peltier (pictured on the video behind him), speaks at Harry Belafonte's Many Rivers Music, Art and Social Justice festival, a two-day event with a star-studded lineup of appearances and performances at the Bouckaert Farm,in Chattahoochee Hills, GA, USA, on October 2, 2016. (Photo: Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

LEVI RICKERT

February 2, 2022

 by yahoo!news

The long and sad imprisonment of Leonard Peltier (Turtle Mountain Chippewa Nation) took on a new complication on Friday when it was reported he tested positive for COVID-19 while incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary at Coleman, Fla. (USP Coleman 1).

To many American Indians, Peltier is a symbol of an oppressive federal system that relegates Native people to apartheid and neglect.

Prison is not a great place to have COVID-19, especially if you are a 77-year-old man with comorbidities that include diabetes, hypertension, a heart condition and acute aneurysm, such as Peltier.

The Prison Policy Initiative reported in October 2021 that the COVID-19 death rate in prisons is more than double that of the general U.S. population, as calculated by the UCLA COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project.

Peltier has been incarcerated for 46 years for the killing of two FBI agents at Oglala on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1975.

To many American Indians, Peltier is a symbol of an oppressive federal system that relegates Native people to apartheid and neglect. He is a political prisoner that we may only think about if we happen to see a bumper sticker on the back of a vehicle that reads "FREE Leonard Peltier."

The International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee (ILPDC) on Saturday afternoon distributed a news release saying the federal prisons acted recklessly in regard to Peltier's care. Peltier has yet to receive a COVID-19 booster shot, 11 months after his last vaccination.

The ILPDC noted in its news release that visitors to USP Coleman 1 have observed that the facility is not mandating vaccines for guards or staff. Guards and staff have been seen improperly wearing masks or not wearing them at all. Social distancing was not encouraged or enforced and booster shots had not, until recently, been available to any inmate at USP Coleman 1.

Soon after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, then U.S. Attorney General William Barr issued U.S. Department of Justice guidelines for COVID Release to Home Confinement for inmates who were elderly or with compromised immune system or co-morbidities on March 26 and again, April 3, 2020.

Peltier's age and comorbidities unequivocally make him eligible for home release under Department of Justice guidelines. Peltier's tribal community on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota has repeatedly expressed willingness to ensure he is provided adequate housing there.

Senate Committee on Indian Affairs Chairman Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawai'i), sent a letter to President Joe Biden last Wednesday urging him to commute Peltier's sentence.

"I commend your administration's commitment to righting past wrongs in our criminal justice system. In continuing that work as you consider recommendations for individuals to receive clemency, I write to urge you to grant a commutation of Leonard Peltier's sentence. Mr. Peltier meets appropriate criteria for commutation: (1) his old age and critical illness, (2) the amount of time he has served, and (3) the unavailability of other remedies. Given these factors, Mr. Peltier should be granted a commutation of his sentence," Chairman Schatz wrote.

Beyond Peltier's current battle with COVID-19, the White House needs to review Peltier's 1977 case, in which two of his co-defendants were acquitted on the basis of self-defense against the FBI.

Peltier was tried separately from his co-defendants.

According to Kevin Sharp, former Chief Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, who Peltier's current attorney, Peltier's trial was replete with prosecutorial misconduct, falsified testimony and fabricated evidence. Even the autopsy presented to the jury was done by an examiner who had never seen the bodies of the two agents.

The former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa, James H. Reynolds, who supervised the post-trial sentencing and appeals, admitted they "shaved a few corners" and "we could not prove Leonard Peltier personally committed any crime on the Pine Ridge Reservation" said in a letter to President Biden last year.

Reynolds wrote "enough is enough."

On behalf of all Indigenous people in the U.S. and across the globe, enough is enough. We call on President Biden to commute the sentence of Leonard Peltier.



LEVI RICKERT (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) is the founder, publisher and editor of Native News Online. He can be reached at levi@nativenewsonline.net.

Advocates urge Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier

by Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

February 10, 2022

President Biden must take action, granting long overdue clemency to Leonard Peltier after close to half a century in prison for a blatantly political prosecution.

Leonard Peltier is a 77-year-old Anishinabe-Lakota Native American activist imprisoned for 46 years for a crime he says he did not commit. Amnesty International calls him a political prisoner. Peltier recently contracted COVID-19 inside the Coleman maximum security federal penitentiary in Florida, where prisoners have reportedly been denied vaccine booster shots.

“In and out of lockdown last year at least meant a shower every third day, a meal beyond a sandwich wet with a little peanut butter—but now with COVID for an excuse, nothing,” Peltier recently wrote. “No phone, no window, no fresh air—no humans to gather—no loved one’s voice. No relief. Left alone and without attention is like a torture chamber for the sick and old.”

Peltier, a member of the American Indian Movement, was convicted of involvement in the killing of two FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ron Williams, in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota on June 26th, 1975, during a period of intense violence on the reservation. Peltier’s arrest and trial were marred by prosecutorial misconduct, withheld evidence, coerced and fabricated eyewitness testimony, and more.

The shootout occurred just three years after the death of J. Edgar Hoover. Under Hoover, the FBI engaged in widespread illegality with its COINTELPRO program, directed against civil rights and antiwar organizations. Groups like the Black Panthers and individuals including Martin Luther King, Jr. were targeted for surveillance, disruption, infiltration, intimidation, and false prosecutions. The FBI intensively targeted the American Indian Movement, which was active protecting elders on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Peltier’s attorney, Kevin Sharp, learned that Peltier had a negative COVID test recently, but not much more: “When will boosters be made available? Any changes in prison COVID protocols to ensure prisoners are safer? When can I speak to Leonard? ” Sharp wrote in an email to us Wednesday. “I was earlier denied a call with the Assistant Warden trying to get these answers.”

Sharp’s route to Peltier’s case was unusual. Nominated to the federal bench by President Obama in 2011, he served as a federal judge in Tennessee for six years, three of them as Chief Judge. In 2017, he resigned, denouncing the mandatory minimum sentences that he was forced to impose. He then worked for the release of Chris Young, who he had mandatorily sentenced to life without parole. TV personality Kim Kardashian got involved, and they won clemency for Young from President Donald Trump. Publicity from that prompted long-time Peltier supporter Connie Nelson, the ex-wife of musician Willie Nelson, to send Sharp information on Peltier’s case.

“I sat down to read the stacks, just reams of information on Leonard’s case, not really coming at it with any preconceived notion… looking at it from the viewpoint of a federal judge,” Sharp explained on the Democracy Now! news hour. “What I saw was shocking. The constitutional violations just continued to stack up. I was outraged that this man was still in prison.”

The movement for executive clemency for Peltier peaked in late 2000, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. Clinton promised to give Peltier’s clemency application “a looksee” on WBAI radio in New York City, when he called us on election day to get out the vote.

Clinton infamously abused the presidential power of clemency, granting pardons to campaign donors and cronies of his half-brother, among others. He denied clemency to Peltier, as did his successors, Presidents George W. Bush, Obama and Trump.

One of the federal prosecutors who put Peltier in prison spoke out, in 2017. “Leonard Peltier’s conviction and continued incarceration is a testament to a time and system of justice that no longer has a place in our society,” retired U.S. Attorney James Reynolds wrote to President Obama. “I have realized that the prosecution and the continued incarceration of Mr. Peltier was and is injust.”

Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who chairs the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, wrote a letter to President Biden on Jan. 28. “I write to urge you to grant a commutation of Leonard Peltier’s sentence. Mr. Peltier meets appropriate criteria for commutation: (1) his old age and critical illness, (2) the amount of time he has already served, and (3) the unavailability of other remedies,” Schatz wrote.

On February 2nd, HuffPost reporter Jennifer Bendery asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki, “Does the President know who Leonard Peltier is?” Psaki replied, “I’m sure he does, but I have not discussed it with him.” Bendery also asked Senate Judiciary Committee chair Sen. Patrick Leahy about Peltier. Leahy said he would ask President Biden about Peltier in their upcoming private meetings.

President Biden must take action, granting long overdue clemency to Leonard Peltier after close to half a century in prison for a blatantly political prosecution.

This column originally appeared in Democracy Now!

ICYMI

Pressure Mounts for Release of Political Prisoner Leonard Peltier

BY LEVI RICKERT 

 

FEBRUARY 12, 2022

NATIVE NEWS

Pressure for President Joe Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier (Turtle Mountain Chippewa Nation) is increasing after it was announced two weeks ago the 77-year-old prisoner contracted COVID-19. Peltier, who tested positive for COVID-19 on January 28, 2022, is incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary at Coleman, Fla. (USP Coleman 1).

Leonard Peltier (Photo/Courtesy)

Peltier was convicted of killing two FBI agents in a shootout at Oglala on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in June 1975. Since many legal experts have maintained the federal case against Peltier was flawed. Native Americans across Indian Country consider him a political prisoner.

Since Peltier was diagnosed with COVID-19, the International Indian Treaty Council, based in Tucson, Ariz. has called on President Biden to release him from prison. In a letter dated Feb. 2, 2022, the IITC tells the president Peltier’s health condition necessitates his release:

“Mr. Peltier has several compounding health conditions, including kidney disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure. COVID-19 is a deadly virus in and of itself and the likelihood of long-COVID disabilities or death increase drastically with pre-existing conditions. A person that contracts COVID-19 with pre-existing kidney disease is twice as likely to succumb to the virus. A person that is over the age of 65 (Mr. Peltier is 77) is 80 times more likely to succumb to the virus.”

The IITC concludes the letter to with a compliment to the Biden administration for its work in Indian Country but emphasizes the need for action on the Peltier case.

“We have seen and felt the commitment the Biden Administration has shown to Indian Country and Indigenous communities. We need to see that same commitment to repair the relationship between the U.S. and Indigenous Peoples of this land in Mr. Peltier’s case,” the letter said.

On Feb. 4, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the longest serving U.S. senator and the president pro tempore of the United States Senate, called on President Biden to release Peltier.

In a statement, Leahy writes:

“I urge President Biden to commute Leonard Peltier’s prison sentence and release him from federal prison. Peltier, a prominent Native American activist, was imprisoned for crimes he and many other legal experts and advocates maintain he never committed. His trial was so riddled with flaws that even one of the prosecutors trying him has acknowledged that Peltier was wrongfully convicted. Peltier, now 77 years old and ailing with multiple health problems, has served more than 44 years in federal prison.”

Leahy concludes his statement by saying: “I call on President Biden to commute Mr. Peltier’s sentence expeditiously. It is the right thing to do.” 

Biden and Leahy spent 36 years serving in the U.S. Senate before Biden became vice president under President Barack Obama.

On Friday, Feb. 10, nine members of Congress, led by Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ),  sent a letter to President Biden, United States Attorney General Merrick Garland, Director of Federal Bureau of Prisons Michael Carvajal, and Southeast Regional Director of Federal Bureau of Prisons William Lothrop, Jr. requesting the expedited release of and clemency for Leonard Peltier. 

In the letter, the members of Congress write:

“In the federal government’s national response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department of Justice (DOJ) authorized the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to release elderly inmates and those with underlying health conditions from federal prisons. Since Mr. Peltier is 77 years old and suffers from diabetes and an abdominal aortic aneurysm, we urged you to release him from federal custody and grant him clemency immediately. Unfortunately, Mr. Peltier has contracted COVID-19 and is now at risk for additional medical complications.

Given Mr. Peltier’s new COVID-19 diagnosis and to avoid further risks to his health and safety, we urge you to approve his pending petition for clemency on humanitarian grounds.”

A Message to President Biden: No Prisoner Swap Needed to FREE Leonard Peltier


Levi Rickert
Sun, December 11, 2022

Cartoon by Ricardo Cate'. (Photo/Facebook)

Opinion. As Americans were beginning their day this past Thursday, news spread quickly that President Joe Biden’s administration had worked out a deal for the release of Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) superstar and two-time Olympic gold medalist Brittney Griner from a Russian penal colony.

Griner was arrested in February when customs officials in Moscow discovered vape canisters with cannabis oil in her luggage. She pleaded guilty to the offense, sentenced to nine years and was transferred last month to the penal colony.

For months, Griner’s supporters put tremendous pressure on the Biden White House to do everything it could do to secure her release. As part of the negotiations, the Biden administration also worked to secure the release of Paul Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive who had been held in Russia for four years on spying charges that are thought to be baseless.

In the end, only Griner was released through an exchange brokered by the State Department for arms dealer Viktor Bout, who is nicknamed “Merchant of Death.” He was convicted 11 years ago in by a jury in New York City of conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens and officials, delivery of military equipment and providing assistance to a terrorist organization. He was sentenced to the minimum of 25 years in prison.

Griner’s release required an exchange. Bout was the exchange. Critics are saying Bout for Griner was not an even exchange.

The whole Griner-Bout prisoner swap prompted talented Native American artists Ricardo Caté (Santo Domingo Pueblo), creator of the Santa Fe New Mexican’s daily “Without Reservations” comic strip, to create a cartoon that read; “It doesn’t take a prisoner swap to free Leonard Peltier.”

Caté’s cartoon, as usual, was on target for a bullseye.

President Biden would not have to worry about coming up with an arms dealer criminal to grant the release of Leonard Peltier (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), who has been incarcerated for 47 years for a crime he did not commit.

Following a controversial trial, Peltier was convicted of aiding and abetting murder and has been imprisoned since 1977. Many people and human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, National Congress of American Indians, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and others believe Peltier is a political prisoner who should be immediately released.

Kevin Sharp, former chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee and now in private practice, spends his time these days seeking the long-overdue release of Peltier.

He gave this statement to Native News Online on Saturday:

“I am happy Brittany Griner is home. Was her trade for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout the right thing to do? That will be for history to decide. But there is another political hostage in this country, Leonard Peltier, and it doesn’t require a swap with the ‘Merchant of Death’ to bring him home. It merely requires the President to sign clemency papers. Leonard’s 47 year incarceration is the product of an FBI vendetta, and the continuation of the government’s mistreatment of Native Americans dating back hundreds of years. Enough is enough. Free Leonard Peltier.”

In a previous conversation with Native News Online in August 2021, Sharp said the federal government now admits they don’t know who shot the agents

“Rather than receiving equal protection under the law, Leonard Peltier was convicted based on fabricated evidence, perjured testimony, and a hidden exculpatory ballistics test. Leonard remains in prison not because of proof beyond a reasonable doubt but because of politics. His last chance at freedom is the collective voice of people who care and dare to stand up for justice and mercy,” Sharp said.

In the case of Griner, there was tremendous pressure put on the White House during the past 10 months to get her freed for what many believe was a miscarriage of justice.

Similarly, there has been a lot of pressure by Native American organizations and many others, including U.S. senators, to see Peltier rightfully set free.

Readers of Native News Online will know I have written several opinion columns calling for the release of Peltier. Obviously, there is a need to write more on this matter.

It is important to keep the pressure on the White House. Letters and calls should not cease. The President should be reminded there is no prisoner swap needed to FREE Leonard Peltier.

About the Author: "Levi Rickert (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) is the founder, publisher and editor of Native News Online. Rickert was awarded Best Column 2021 Native Media Award for the print\/online category by the Native American Journalists Association. He serves on the advisory board of the Multicultural Media Correspondents Association. He can be reached at levi@nativenewsonline.net."

Contact: levi@nativenewsonline.net

Free Leonard Peltier
By Nick Estes

March 5, 2023

Source: Jacobin


The way Leonard Peltier tells it, he was a criminal the day he was born — but not by choice. The seventy-eight-year-old Anishinaabe and Dakota elder says his “aboriginal sin” was being born Indian in a country founded on Indians’ forced disappearance.

Recent investigations by the US Department of the Interior into the federal Indian boarding school system have confirmed Peltier’s version of history and what Native people have been saying for generations: that the boarding system was a horrific, sprawling network, encompassing more than four hundred schools across thirty-seven states or then-territories and targeting countless Native children. For more than 150 years, government officials stole Native children from their families, and many never returned home. Federal agents punished, and sometimes imprisoned, recalcitrant parents for keeping their children away from schools where their languages, their sense of self, and sometimes their very lives were taken from them. The child removal policy aimed to destroy Native families and weaken resistance to land seizures.

Peltier was nine years old when a government agent snatched him and his sisters away from their grandmother and placed them at the Wahpeton Boarding School in North Dakota. He remembers his grandmother crying, barely understanding the words of the person taking her grandchildren. He recalls parents singing “that way they do when someone has passed” as their children were loaded onto buses. “Maybe that day was my introduction to this destiny I did not choose,” Peltier wrote last year about his harrowing first day of boarding school. That episode, which he called “one of horror,” has haunted Peltier for life.

Last month marked Peltier’s forty-eighth year behind bars, locked away in a federal penitentiary in Florida, far from his family and homelands, and serving two consecutive life sentences for killing two FBI agents on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in June 1975, a crime he says he did not commit. His supporters consider his life of incarceration a collective punishment for indigenous people’s long history of defiance against US government policies. He is the longest-held indigenous political prisoner in the United States.

A nearly five-decade-long campaign to free Peltier has drawn the support of millions, including many Native nations, politicians, activists, celebrities, and world leaders. In the 1980s, more than seventeen million Soviet citizens sent petitions to Washington calling for Peltier’s release. Their government granted him political asylum and sent him a physician to examine his ailing eyes. The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, where Peltier is enrolled, has urged President Joe Biden to free its elderly citizen and has prepared for his return home. Even a former federal prosecutor who helped keep Peltier in prison has petitioned for his clemency. Last year, United Nations experts recommended Peltier’s immediate release after finding that his imprisonment was so excessive it amounted to arbitrary detention.

Despite all appeals, the FBI remains the most outspoken opponent of freeing Peltier. “Retribution seems to have emerged as the primary if not sole reason” for Peltier’s continued imprisonment, Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI agent who was close to his case, wrote in a letter to Biden last December urging Peltier’s release. She called the FBI’s near half-century campaign an “emotion-driven ‘FBI family’ vendetta” against Peltier and the American Indian Movement.

Leonard Peltier, AIM, and the Fight for Native Rights

Born in 1944, Peltier joined the American Indian Movement (AIM) during the group’s heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. AIM had been formed in 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, partly to end Native family separation and police violence. Two studies from 1969 to 1974 found that 25 to 35 percent of all Native children had been separated from their families and placed into institutions, foster care, or adoptive families. Many of AIM’s founders, like Peltier, had survived boarding schools only to face racism and inner-city poverty, incarceration, or the threat of having their families broken apart. AIM’s purpose was to build an alternative to this grim reality and to fight for Native rights.

Post–World War II Indian policy in the United States sought to formally end relations between the government and American Indian nations. “Termination policy” abolished more than one hundred tribes and removed millions of acres of land from federal trust status, opening them up for privatization and resource extraction. “Relocation policy” aimed to finish what termination had started by inducing hundreds of thousands of Native people to leave their reservations to find employment in far-off urban centers like Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Urban poverty and discrimination replaced rural, reservation poverty. These assimilationist policies gave rise to the Red Power movement in the 1960

s.

A wall on Alcatraz with the written message, “Indians Welcome.”

 (Loco Steve / Wikimedia Commons)

Urban Native activists began occupying abandoned federal property to dramatize their demands, famously taking over the Alcatraz prison island in San Francisco Bay in 1969. AIM followed suit, leading a nationwide takeover of Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) offices in 1970 in protest of discriminatory hiring practices that privileged white employees over American Indian employees. The actions helped transform AIM from a local Twin Cities, Minnesota organization into a national movement.

By 1972 AIM had chapters in every region of the United States, and the same year, Peltier formerly joined AIM. He followed the movement to Washington, DC, taking over BIA headquarters during the Trail of Broken Treaties, which sought to reestablish treaty-making and nation-to-nation relations with the United States.

That action drew the ire of tribal leaders in the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation, located largely in South Dakota, who banned AIM leaders from the reservation. Dissident Oglalas called on AIM to take a stand at Wounded Knee, abolish the tribal council, and reinstate the validity of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and the traditional Lakota government. They obliged — for seventy-one days, beginning on February 27, 1973, Oglalas and members of AIM occupied Wounded Knee, South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Following the highly publicized takeover, violence and terror gripped the Pine Ridge. Dick Wilson, the autocratic tribal president, led a vicious crackdown on reservation dissidents, who sought to overturn a corrupt tribal council system that catered to outside economic interests and the assimilationist policies of the BIA. AIM allied itself with the “traditionals,” those who defended Lakota spirituality, sovereignty, and treaty rights. Elders, like Celia and Harry Jumping Bull, called upon Peltier and AIM for protection from Wilson’s vigilante “goon squad” and the FBI, who were waging a low-intensity dirty war against AIM and its supporters in the aftermath of Wounded Knee.

Leonard Peltier’s 1972 headshot. (FBI via Wikimedia Commons)

Two months before the firefight that would change Peltier’s life — and following the 1974 acquittal of AIM leadership involved in the Wounded Knee takeover — the FBI issued an internal position paper entitled “FBI Paramilitary Operations in Indian Country,” a how-to plan for confronting AIM in a battlefield-type situation. The report referred to an area outside the village of Oglala as having bunkers that would require a paramilitary force to overtake. The month before the firefight, FBI personnel, mostly SWAT team members, swarmed the Pine Ridge Reservation. One FBI map of the Jumping Bull property identified “bunkers” that turned out to be crumbling root cellars. Tensions were high, and the FBI appeared ready for war.

On June 25, 1975, FBI agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler wore plain clothes and drove unmarked vehicles into the Jumping Bull ranch — outside Oglala on the western side of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation — while supposedly serving a warrant for assault and theft of a pair of cowboy boots. The agents never identified themselves, and a firefight erupted, catching a family with small children in the cross fire.

The shooting roused Peltier and his AIM group, which included Native youths, some of whom returned fire. One hundred fifty FBI agents, BIA police, and local vigilantes surrounded the property shortly after the shooting started. Peltier, his group, and local residents barely escaped through a barrage of bullets.

When the shooting stopped, three lay dead. The FBI claims Williams and Coler were shot in the head at close range. Joe Stuntz, a twenty-three-year-old member of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, was also killed. An unknown police agent shot Stuntz in the head. No one was ever prosecuted for his murder.

Meanwhile, Peltier and his group split up. Some of the youngsters returned to pay their respects at Stuntz’s funeral. Peltier and the others went underground. But the FBI, leading one the largest manhunts in its history, eventually caught up with them, eager to mete out its version of justice.

The Trials

The circumstances surrounding the June 1975 firefight — which a US Commission on Civil Rights investigation described as part of an FBI “reign of terror” against AIM and its supporters — were enough to convince an all-white jury in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1976 to acquit Peltier’s codefendants of murder charges on grounds of self-defense.

Bob Robideau and Dino Butler’s defense offered evidence of the FBI’s history of misconduct, which had recently been revealed during high-profile Senate hearings spearheaded by Idaho senator Frank Church. Church himself testified at the trial that “certain groups” — like the Communist Party, the Black Panthers, and the antiwar movement — “were targeted for surveillance [by the FBI] at least in part because of political attitudes.” AIM, too, faced its share of FBI harassment: disruptive informants, bad-jacketing campaigns, and paranoia-inducing surveillance.

The evidence presented was so damning that Peltier would be free today if he had been tried alongside Butler and Robideau. But he was prosecuted separately, with the government selecting a less sympathetic judge and less favorable venue (Fargo, North Dakota).

Peltier had fled after the shoot-out to Canada, where he was arrested and extradited to the United States based on false affidavits given by Myrtle Poor Bear, who claimed to be Peltier’s girlfriend at the time and an eyewitness to the agents’ killings. She was neither, nor had she ever met Peltier before his trial. Poor Bear later recanted her story, claiming she was coerced and threatened by FBI agents to provide false testimony. Other witnesses said FBI agents also threatened them or coerced their testimony.

FBI bullying of witnesses, however, was not allowed to be presented as evidence to the jury, nor was the climate of fear the FBI had created on the reservation. The prosecution withheld important ballistics evidence, it was later revealed, that could have been exculpatory. And one juror openly admitted to the court that she was “prejudiced against Indians” yet was allowed to remain on the jury.

In April 1977, the jury found Peltier guilty, and the judge sentenced him to two consecutive life sentences. “I have done nothing to feel guilty about,” Peltier told the judge. “The only thing I am guilty of and which I was convicted for was of being Chippewa and Sioux blood and for believing our sacred religion.”

On appeal, the government was forced to drop its theory that Peltier personally shot the agents due to lack of evidence. It instead pivoted to an accusation of aiding and abetting their murder. When asked whom Peltier was aiding and abetting, US Attorney Lynn Crooks answered, “whoever did the final shooting.” He added: “Perhaps aiding and abetting himself.”

Putting aside the absurdity of aiding and abetting oneself, Peltier could not have aided and abetted his codefendants, because aiding and abetting self-defense is not a crime. And according to the government’s own account, his codefendants were the only people close to the agents’ bodies during the firefight.

The theory upon which Peltier’s conviction now rests “is that he was guilty of murder simply because he was present with a weapon at the Reservation that day,” former US Attorney James Reynolds write in a 2021 letter to President Biden asking for Peltier’s clemency. Reynolds worked on Peltier’s prosecution and appeals cases, but believes today that his prosecution and continued incarceration “was and is unjust.” The prosecution was “not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense on the Pine Ridge Reservation.”

In a phone interview, Peltier told me that the facts of his case prove his innocence — but that the truth alone has not set him free.

Freedom for Peltier

Three days before the Jumping Bull shoot-out, the Church Committee decided to investigate FBI surveillance of AIM. But the decision was hushed up the day after the firefight. The International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee and Oglala members have been calling for a congressional investigation into the murders, rapes, and beatings that went uninvestigated or unsolved during that reign of terror.

According to Coleen Rowley, the former FBI agent, the bureau “indoctrinated” new agents at Quantico in the prosecution’s version of Peltier’s case in the 1980s. While FBI agents have restricted First Amendment rights, they made an exception for Peltier, she said, encouraging agents to write op-eds against his release and even marching in front of the White House during the final days of the Clinton administration to oppose a possible presidential pardon. Rowley is a rare dissenting voice as a retired FBI agent once close to Peltier’s case.

But there are more unanswered questions about Peltier’s case and uncertainty about his freedom. In a recent message to supporters, he spoke about his fear of never getting out of prison, or of only having a limited amount of time with his family before he leaves this world for the next.

February marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Wounded Knee occupation, but the wounds of the past have not been healed. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which aimed to reverse the Native family separation that took away Peltier and countless others, is on the chopping block at the Supreme Court. And the Biden administration has been silent about Peltier’s clemency application — his only legal chance at freedom.

“I live in the nation’s fastest-growing reservation in the United States,” Peltier once said about his predicament in federal prison.

But in a recent statement to supporters, Peltier expressed hope and encouraged them to teach their children “to plant a food forest or any plant that will provide for them in the future.”

“Plant a tree for me,” Peltier said.

Activists Have Lobbied For This Native American Prisoner's Release For Decades. Now Due To COVID They Fear His Time Is Running Out.

Leonard Peltier has spent 46 years in prison for the murders of two FBI agents. He and his supporters have long said that his conviction was based on an unfair trial.

by Stephanie K. Baer

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted 5 hours ago

Mike Simons / Tulsa World via AP

Demonstrators carry a banner during a rally for Leonard Peltier in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Feb. 7, 2022.

Supporters of a Native American activist who has spent more than 40 years behind bars for a crime he says he didn't commit have ramped up their push for clemency after he recently tested positive for COVID-19.

Leonard Peltier is serving consecutive life sentences in a high-security Florida prison for the murders of two FBI agents in a 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. For decades, he and his supporters have lobbied for his sentence to be reduced, arguing that his conviction was based on lies, threats, and faulty evidence.

Now that the 77-year-old activist, who has diabetes and an abdominal aortic aneurysm, has COVID, it may be his last chance at freedom.

"Time will be of the essence if he turns south quickly," his attorney and former US District Court judge Kevin Sharp told BuzzFeed News. "He could get it again. How many times can he take this before he can’t take it? He got life, not death."

Cliff Schiappa / Associated Press

Leonard Peltier in 1986

A prominent member of the Indigenous rights group American Indian Movement, Peltier had traveled to Pine Ridge in 1975 to assist members of the reservation amid tensions between those who supported the tribal government and those who supported AIM. Formed in the 1960s, the group sought to draw attention to police brutality and discrimination against Indigenous people and stand up for their rights under the treaties between the US government and Native American tribes.

While Peltier has admitted he was present at the June 26, 1975, shootout that resulted in the deaths of FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams as well as a Native American man named Joseph Stuntz, he has long maintained his innocence. More than 40 people were involved in the gunfight, but only Peltier and three others were ever charged. Two of his codefendants were acquitted on the basis of self-defense, while the charges against the fourth were dropped. Stuntz's death was never investigated.

Peltier is considered by many to be a political prisoner due, in part, to the ways in which his case was prosecuted. Officials were never able to prove that Peltier fired the fatal shots that killed the agents. Instead, prosecutors relied on testimony from supposed witnesses who later recanted their statements, saying that FBI agents threatened and coerced them into lying. Years after Peltier was convicted, it was revealed that the government withheld a ballistics report that showed the shell casings collected from the scene didn't come from his weapon, according to his attorney.

"The president has the power under the Constitution to fix this today," Sharp said. "[The Bureau of Prisons] can fix it by sending him ... for home confinement or compassionate release. And it's so easy that if you're not doing it, it's politics."

In recent days, Native state lawmakers and members of Congress, including Sen. Patrick Leahy, have made personal appeals to President Joe Biden to release Peltier. "He is exactly the kind of individual who should be considered for clemency," Leahy said in a statement.

Even actors like Susan Sarandon and Danny DeVito have urged Biden to let him go.

"You can do it man," DeVito tweeted. "Pick up that pen."

Twitter: @DannyDeVito

Peltier first tested positive for COVID on Jan. 28 and was dealing with a painful, persistent cough, according to his attorney. Although he did receive his first two doses of the vaccine, Peltier did not receive a booster shot before he got sick, despite being eligible for one.

On Monday, Sharp said he has not been able to get updates on Peltier's condition since last week.

"I have no idea how Leonard is doing because no one has spoken to me," he told BuzzFeed News.

In response to BuzzFeed News' questions, a White House official acknowledged Peltier's request for clemency and the public support to release him and said all requests for pardon or commutation go through the White House Counsel’s Office.

"I don’t have more to share on Mr. Peltier’s request at this time," they said.

A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on Peltier's case, but said the agency cannot act alone to reduce an inmate's sentence, noting that the BOP director must ask the prosecuting US attorney's office to file a motion to do so.

The FBI and the Department of Justice declined BuzzFeed News' requests for comment. But a former FBI agent who monitored the case for the last 15 years said the agency would probably be unsupportive of releasing Peltier.

"I can't speak for the FBI, but I can tell you from my past experience the FBI was — and probably continues to be — opposed to any clemency being granted and any consideration being given to Peltier getting out of [prison]," retired assistant special agent in charge Bob Perry told BuzzFeed News.

In December 2000, after then-president Bill Clinton said he would consider Peltier's request for clemency, FBI agents took the unusual step of staging a rally outside the White House in protest.

Reuters

FBI agents protest the campaign for Peltier's clemency outside the White House on Dec. 15, 2000.